


Rituals

by Sunhawk16



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 15:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunhawk16/pseuds/Sunhawk16
Summary: Putting up the twelve days of Christmas from 2015.  This was Day 2 (Day one is always art) a bit of weird humor.Heero POV.I want to take a minute here to thank everybody for the kudos and the comments and I know I must be frustrating with my lack of response and the utter sluggishness of my getting these older things posted.  Dacia has been a God-send, getting all the archived fics pulled in for me and I hope we will 'meet in the middle' one of these days soon and I can safely say that everything I've written will be here.





	Rituals

**Author's Note:**

> Putting up the twelve days of Christmas from 2015. This was Day 2 (Day one is always art) a bit of weird humor.  
> Heero POV.  
> I want to take a minute here to thank everybody for the kudos and the comments and I know I must be frustrating with my lack of response and the utter sluggishness of my getting these older things posted. Dacia has been a God-send, getting all the archived fics pulled in for me and I hope we will 'meet in the middle' one of these days soon and I can safely say that everything I've written will be here.

Tuesday morning and not yet lunch time, and I was already irritated at the world. Duo Maxwell had a field assignment and he had not yet arrived in my office. Duo Maxwell always stopped by my office when he had a mission. We never discussed it, he had no real reason to do so, but it could be depended on like clock-work.

And even if it had taken me the better part of a year to notice the pattern, I’d come to count on it.

Call it a ritual. Blame it on habit. Say it’s for luck. Explain it however you like; it was part of his going out, and I was seriously not happy that he had broken the custom.

He should have been in my office ten minutes ago. He should have thumped my shoulder, or bumped my fist, or flashed me a peace sign and asked me to water the plants he didn’t own.

‘For God’s sake, Yuy,’ Wufei grumbled, not even looking up from his computer screen across the office. ‘Just go find him and stop glaring at the clock before you melt it off the wall.’

It surprised me that he’d noticed my irritation, and surprised me more that he understood the source. Though damned if I’d let him know that.

‘I could sit and glare at you instead,’ I told him, and shifted the weight of my stare in his direction to prove the point.

‘Equally ineffective,’ he said, his typing not slowing. ‘His transport leaves in thirty minutes. Go now because I’m not putting up with you growling at me for the next three days.’

So I went. I considered sitting there for a bit longer, maybe leaving with my water glass and pretending I was just going to the break room, but really… there obviously wasn’t any point.

And Wufei would have just laughed at me.

I took my glare and my irritation and stalked down the hall to Duo’s office. The only occupant was Duo’s partner, a guy with the unlikely name of Fabien McIntosh. He is not my favorite person in the building… Duo seems to get along with him ok, but I find his attitude annoying.

When I walked into the office, he looked up from his computer and grinned at me in a manner that spoke of smugness. Way too wide and way too happy to see me.

‘Wouldn’t be looking for Duo, would you?’ he asked, entirely too pleased to think so.

‘Your powers of deduction are as sharp as ever, McIntosh,’ I said, and let the glare find a target in his person.

It just made him chuckle. ‘Didn’t he stop by to see you?’ he asked, just a little too innocently.

‘No,’ I growled and took myself the rest of the way into the office, going to stand in front of his desk. Irritation sharpening into something two or three notches above suspicion. ‘You seem to find that amusing.’

‘Oh,’ he grinned broadly, ‘I find it damn hysterical, but I’m easily amused.’

I started to point out that simple minds usually were easily amused, but I knew the asshole wasn’t stupid. I leaned down and planted my fists on his desk, putting my glare more in his line of sight and asked quietly, ‘What the hell did you do?’

He sat back in his chair, trying to make it look casual, but clearly putting a bit of space between us. ‘Lighten up, man,’ he said. ‘I’m just messing with him is all. It’s what partners do.’

There were a whole lot of things that wanted to come out of my mouth at that point, but I edited it down to, ‘What the hell did you do?’ Since I hadn’t gotten an answer the first damn time.

He snorted and rolled his eyes, still trying to look like my proximity wasn’t making him a bit nervous. I leaned forward just a hair more.

‘Come on,’ he laughed, a little too boisterously, maybe the joke not quite so funny since nobody else in the room was laughing. ‘He goes over to see you every time he goes out without fail. I just kind of pointed it out is all.’

Pointed it out. Messed with him.

Duo is… a damn smart man. A genius in some areas. He’s a top agent. An excellent pilot; our best. Dedicated. Committed.

And entirely too easy to ‘mess with’ in some ways because he’s also… vaguely superstitious. Not gullible, but his mind works in some very strange ways sometimes.

‘Let me clarify this,’ I growled, leaning in just a bit more. ‘On the day your partner is going out on a solo mission for three days, undercover and into a presumably dangerous situation, you felt the need to… mess with him?’

Not ever being in a position to see the expression on my own face at times like that, I can’t really say what you would call it. Something well beyond glare. It usually makes people get the hell out of my way at the very least. And it finally wiped the smug look off McIntosh’s face.

‘Oh come on,’ he grumbled, ‘it was just a joke…’

‘The joke,’ I snarled, ‘is sitting in your fucking chair. You know what’s going to happen if the slightest thing goes wrong with this mission? You will either be unemployed or running for your life.’

He didn’t have an answer for that other than letting his mouth fall open, his eyes go wide and uttering a few incoherent sounds that were a search for a comeback.

Not that I gave him time to form anything more. He might have managed something witty, but I doubt it, and I didn’t care. I stormed off for the hanger bay. I only had about twenty minutes left.

Life is full of rituals. Habits. Weird little superstations that everybody indulges in. We knock on wood and we cross our fingers and we sometimes remember not to step on cracks in the sidewalk. We don’t remember why. Do we care that knocking on a desktop is probably a poor stand-in for some ancient homage to trees? No, we don’t. We just smile and tap the laminate wood product and feel better about our luck.

Duo… is a complicated man. He is of two minds over all the silliness; he’s perfectly logical enough to know damn well that his not crossing his fingers or tossing salt over his shoulder or whatever the hell else, doesn’t mean a damn thing.

But there is some tiny part of his soul that can’t quite stop looking for ways to ward off the bad luck. I can only assume it’s got something to do with his childhood. He’s had more than his fair share of rolling snake eyes, and I can see where that would make a man just a touch nervous sometimes.

I’m not quite sure how I had become his touchstone, but I obviously had. Apparently, very obviously. And I am just a bit embarrassed to wonder if it wasn’t so damn obvious that Wufei and McIntosh might even have noticed before I had.

I can also see the implication in the whole thing that I’m sure McIntosh chose to exploit. The thing that he used to make Duo doubt his intentions. Made Duo hesitate to make the simple walk down the hall to see me before he headed out.

And that was just kind of embarrassing too. Guess it was pretty damn obvious how we felt about each other and probably high time we did something about that.

Just… not today. That would be messing in a whole different way, that wasn’t any better than McIntosh’s stupid joke.

When I stalked into the hanger, there was barely ten minutes to take off and I had thought I was going to have to storm right onto the plane, but Duo was still standing beside it, going over his gear.

I could see the apprehension hovering over him like a shadow. Nothing awful, but there was a faint frown on his face, and a tension in the set of his shoulders that told me he’d been thoroughly messed with.

McIntosh had planted just the right seeds in just the right soil, but damned if I’d let Duo nurture the things.

‘Maxwell!’ I hollered as I marched across the bay. ‘The hell?’

I caught him by surprise and he looked up, confusion on his face, but I could already see some of the tension leaving him. ‘Heero?’ he asked, gear forgotten for the moment, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘Am I watering your stupid plants, or not?’ I demanded, stopping in front of him, hands on hips. ‘You can’t just freaking assume, damn it! Have the decency to ask!’

He blinked at me for a minute, and then a broad grin broke out on his face. ‘What?’ he wanted to know, ‘like you’re doing anything else?’

‘I do have a life,’ I huffed, and reached out to poke him in the chest, making sure that contact happened before he got on the plane. ‘And a little common courtesy would be nice.’

The grin toned down and he cocked his head, ‘sorry man, would it be too much to ask for you to water my plants while I’m gone?’

‘Fine,’ I grumbled, rolling my eyes at him, but relieved to see the unease gone from his eyes. ‘But next time don’t make me hunt you down.’

‘Got it,’ he grinned and reached out to thump my shoulder, and there wasn’t any hesitation to it. Guess McIntosh hadn’t planted deep enough.

I stepped back as Duo started up the steps into the plane, duffle tossed over his shoulder. He stopped at the top and turned back. ‘And don’t forget to feed the cat,’ he hollered and was gone.

Cat? There was a cat? There had never been a cat before.

‘Damn it!’ I muttered, knowing I’d be making a trip to his stupid apartment that evening just to verify there wasn’t really a stupid cat.

I wondered if I could get Commander Une to transfer Duo to mine and Wufei’s office… McIntosh was turning into a really bad damn influence.


End file.
